Key Points

The Cannes Film Festival has put together a powerful jury for its 78th edition, including Halle Berry, Jeremy Strong and Payal Kapadia, reports ‘Variety’.

Mixing actors, filmmakers and authors, the jury will also comprise of South Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo, Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher, French-Moroccan writer Leila Slimani, as well as Congolese director, documentarist and producer Dieudo Hamadi, as well as Mexican filmmaker and producer Carlos Reygadas.

As previously announced, Juliette Binoche will preside over the jury, succeeding Greta Gerwig who handed out the Palme d’Or to Sean Baker’s ‘Anora’.

As per ‘Variety’, both Strong and Kapadia were at Cannes last year, in competition. Strong presented Ali Abbasi’s ‘The Apprentice’ in which he starred as Roy Cohn, while Kapadia was there with her fiction debut, ‘All We Imagine as Light’ which won the Grand Prize.

Berry became the first African-American woman to win best actress at the Oscars for her performance in Marc Forster’s ‘Monster’s Ball’. She directed her first film, ‘Bruised’, in 2020, and she has co-produced some of the films she stars in, most recently Alexandre Aja’s ‘Never Let Go’.

Rohrwacher is a Cannes regular. She’s presented several films in competition, notably ‘The Wonders’ and ‘Happy as Lazzaro’ and ‘La Chimera’ directed by her sister Alice Rohrwacher, along with Matteo Garrone’s ‘Tale of Tales’ and Nanni Moretti’s ‘Tre Piani’. Sangsoo is another Cannes fixture. He presented four films in Competition and four films in the Un Certain Regard section. Hamadi presented his film ‘Downstream to Kinshasa’ at Cannes in 2020.

Reygadas, meanwhile, has been at the festival many times, starting in 2005 with his second film ‘Battle in Heaven’ and he won best director with ‘Post Tenebras Lux’ in 2012. He’s also co-produced films by Amat Escalante, Dea Kulumbegashvili, Christine Haroutounian and Hilal Baydarov. Reygadas is currently working on his next film, ‘Wake of Umbra’. Slimani is a renowned book author who has been tied to the film world through her books.

- IANS